I've been thinking about this a bit lately, incomplete thoughts ahead...

Yes, people still play, but they no longer create.

With the exception of Adversarial attacks on particular algorithms, no human is creating new Chess theory, discovering new openings, for example.

As a game, challenge, competition, social activity, chess is alive and well.

As a creative endeavour, or vehicle for discovery, Chess is solved. It is no longer an art of its own.

We're part way through this transition now with Go as well. New opening theory, new joseki, new strategies are being played by robots, and at the highest professional levels we are playing catch-up to understand.

> no human is creating new Chess theory, discovering new openings, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongcloud_Attack

But isn’t that inevitably the final form of any highly complex tactics game (in lieu of a better word) humans create? I guess we reached the ceiling of what we can fathom on our own, so the logical next step is to hand over to robots that can grasp a wider range of possibilities, and learn from them.

I once heard someone say people will never be able to understand God’s plan, just as a dog will never be able to really understand why their owners do things the way they do them. I feel like this is a similar threshold; a humans mind is incredible, but not perfectly suited for thinking in advance, or calculating probabilities.

So I guess my point is, while this certainly feels a little scary, I think it’s just a consequence of the game, and probably okay.

> With the exception of Adversarial attacks on particular algorithms, no human is creating new Chess theory, discovering new openings, for example.

That's not true though? Human chessplayers are constantly exploring new lines, and engines are a useful tool but by no means the bottom line - indeed lines that were neglected because engines gave them low evaluations have been a fruitful source of ideas lately, because humans play differently from engines and may not be able to find the refutation.

Yeah I totally get this is the same thing that has happened so many times before. But at least for chess, it was never a practical thing and was a competition. Like how the existence of aimbots does not ruin a game as long as you are playing against other humans.

For art it feels a bit different since it’s not competitive and more a practicality thing. Perhaps art will shift from placing individual strokes on an image and move to making creative directions for AI to resolve in to an image or enable more people to create labor intensive works like animation.

Or with the internet , Linux and open source. Suddenly you could downloads 1000s of apps, most much better, what I ever could do byself.